Aimed at children and adults alike, the extensive range from Creative Tops will span all areas of home and kitchenware and will include mugs, travel mugs, tinware, bakeware, melamine and more.

Stephanie Griggs, Licensing and Design Manager at the Roald Dahl Literary Estate said: “we’re delighted to have Creative Tops on board, their design and product development skill set will take Roald Dahl’s stories and characters into a new and exciting direction. We’re really looking forward to seeing where it takes us.”

Alicia Davenport, Licensing Director at DRi Licensing added, “Creative Tops is a market leader in homewares and has an excellent retail footprint and broad customer base. This is a very exciting time for the Roald Dahl brand; the category is a natural next step to our licensing activities and we believe we’ve found the perfect partner in Creative Tops!”

The first launches will be towards the end of 2017, and Creative Tops will be showing their Roald Dahl portfolio of designs at next week’s Spring Fair. Catch them in Hall 9.

Roald Dahl was a spy, ace fighter-pilot, chocolate historian and medical inventor. He was also the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG and many more brilliant stories.

He remains the World’s No.1 storyteller.

Born in Cardiff of Norwegian descent, Roald Dahl (1916–1990) joined the RAF at the age of 23 and began writing, initially for adults, after being injured in a plane crash during WW2.

Sitting in a hut at the bottom of his garden, surrounded by odd bits and pieces such as a suitcase (used as a footrest), his own hipbone (which he’d had replaced) and a heavy ball of metal foil (made from years’ worth of chocolate wrappers), he went on to write some of the world’s best-loved children’s stories. His first children’s story, James and the Giant Peach, was published in 1961, was a hit and every subsequent book became a best-seller.

Today, his stories are available in 59 languages and, by a conservative estimate, he has sold more than 200 million books. Many of these stories have also been adapted for stage and screen, including the 1971 film classic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Wes Anderson’s acclaimed Fantastic Mr Fox, and the multi-award winning Matilda The Musical from the RSC with music by Tim Minchin. The latest Roald Dahl story to hit the big screen was Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of The BFG, in July 2016.

Roald Dahl said, “If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”